The very first phone I remember us having was a black bakelite thing that sat in a little cubby hole under the stairs. Our phone number was 294 and you had to call the operator to get connected with anyone anywhere. Long distance calling was considerd only for an emergency because it was so expensive. Today I have to dial a 10 digit number to call the house next door. I have five extensions (four of them are wireless) and an answering machine. This is all 'necessary' to stay connected to the rest of the world. For a while I didn't have an answering machine and friends would get ticked off that they couldn't leave messages for me. When did it become necessary to be so connected?
Granted, the technology makes it easy to stay connected and who can resist one base unit with three other phones charging up in other parts of the house. No phone is more than five or six steps away from where I am. Is this why we are all a little more hefty than we have been in the past? My mother used to regale us with stories of drunks calling in the middle of the night for my lawyer father and her tripping over the end of the bed while rushing to pick up the hone in the center of the house. In the same situation today all I have to do is roll over and a phone is right at hand.
The greatest leap forward, at least in my opinion, has been the emergence of the cellular phone. I've had one for at least 15 years. In the beginning you never got charged for calls if you used less than one minute of air time. Paul and all his little buddies were able to make a zillion calls a month without any additional charges by timing their calls just right. The cell phone has also caused a lot of problems for me. At one time I had been out of town and left the phone with Paul. I got back into town and didn't have my house keys. I tried several times to call him from the corner market but he wouldn't pick up because he didn't know who was calling. I ended up asleep on my back deck waiting for him to come home. When did we stop automatically answering the phone? You could blame the telemarketers but I also blame the technology that allows them to reach out and touch us based on our demographics. Some of these calls are so specific to me and my needs I have to shake my head in wonder. The programming is amazing but I don't want any more calls from Bank of America asking me to sign up for their identity theft program - seven calls now and still counting!
Another area of technology that I love is the growth of calender and address book information keepers. The move from a pocket calender to a Filofax to a Personal Digital Assistant(PDA) seems to have occured almost overnight. The pocket calender was from the dentist and came in the mail in December with your cleaning reminder. The Filofax keep your calender and address book on seven hole punched paper so you could re-write pages when your friends moved for the fifth time in as many years and you could keep whole years of appointments in storage... just in case you needed them. The move to the PDA definitely met my technology love factor. It not only kept about 300 numbers and addresses and twelve years of appointments but I could also play video games on it. I kept so much on mine that I needed a memory card to hold the overflow. The only down side was that I couldn't doodle in the margins when I was in boring meetings. I guess there is still a need for pen and paper.
Yesterday my cell phone and PDA loves came together when I bought a new cell phone. My old phone was completely battered from being dropped on the concrete driveway so many times that there were whole chunks missing off it. I went to the Sprint store and found a flashy red number that was also a PDA by Palm. I am now in hog heaven. I can keep my calender on my laptop and on my phone. Ask me if I am busy on a particular day and I can now whip out my phone to check rather than searching for my calender. All 300 phone numbers are in both places and I have even begun adding mailing addresses to the laptop version. I just better keep the laptop backed up more frequently so I don't lose all this data.
Although this phone will also connect me to the internet to watch TV, read e-mail and cruise the internet, I don't think I want to do any of those things on a two inch screen. I now have my two favroite techie toys in one flashy red fashion accessory. All I need to do now is construct a carrier for it so it won't get as battered as the phone I replaced. My new high tech toy in a hand sewn pouch - .. there's something poetic about that.
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